


(un)foreseen events

by NightsMistress



Category: Final Fantasy XIII Series
Genre: Background Lightning/Snow Villiers, F/M, Post-Series, Treat Fic, getting together fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-20 13:48:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4789496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Serah Farron has woken up in the new world and is determined to carve out an unremarkable existence for herself, despite having once been a seer who died seeing the end of the world. Her plan to be just an ordinary grad student of history goes completely out the window when it turns out that Hope Estheim is a visiting scholar at her university.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(un)foreseen events

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lescafenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lescafenix/gifts).



> Hi LescaFenix! I saw that you'd been requesting this ship for a very long time, and I thought I had to reward that kind of dedication! So I wrote you a treat and now I kind of ship these two a lot. Hopefully this is the kind of Serah/Hope story that you've been hoping for!
> 
> It's probably best not to ask what titles this story had before I settled on this one.

Being reborn wasn’t what Serah thought it would be. That was consistent; dying hadn’t been what she thought it would be either.

When her sister defeated a god and wrested a new world for humanity, humanity woke up changed. Most people remembered their past life only in startlingly vivid dreams, which Serah supposed made sense, especially for those who had lived in Nova Chrysalia before their rebirth.  Five hundred years of soul-crushing misery would be terrible to remember.  Some remembered more.

Serah remembered everything. It was why she and Snow had drifted apart in the end, because he remembered everything too and the weight of those memories was too much for anyone to bear. Her own double set of memories — one of a girl who went from needing a hero to being her own, and one of a girl who remembered everything, even as a child — were why she had thrown herself into her studies, first skipping through school as she didn’t learn the material so much as remember it. Then, university. She’d been the youngest undergraduate in her history classes, barely sixteen, and desperate to prove to the world that she was a self-made woman who would chart her own course. She would have finished her degree in three years, had it been allowed, and she had filled her timetable with additional classes of things she had never studied instead. It was not until she had been accepted as a graduate that she allowed herself time to breathe and appreciate that the world had finally accepted her as an adult. She promised that she would work hard, complete her studies on time, live her life to the fullest, and not be distracted by her memories of the past.

It was six weeks into semester before she truly started to fulfill that promise.

Phoenix University had earned its reputation as being a gruelling graduate program fairly, and Serah thought that she might never surface from her readings for air. She had studied history as an undergraduate, of course, but the expectations were entirely different. Everyone assumed that if you were in the program, you knew what you were doing, even if you were as young as Serah. It was intoxicating.

Well, ordinarily it was. Right now, she wasn’t sure that enrolling in a graduate course so young had been such a good idea. She had an assignment due in six hours, and she was still nowhere near finishing it. Her sleep pattern had been disrupted trying to get her other assignments done as well, and so this all-nighter meant that every time she heard a creak or saw a shadow, she thought for a brief moment that there hat there was a terrible monster lurking behind her.  She was learning that the graduate study area, for all that it was a collection of desks, power points, and beanbags, was downright unsettling when you were working on your own, even without an overactive imagination.

She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to alleviate the scratchy dryness that came with being awake too long, and attempted to read her final six paragraphs again.  She was fairly certain that all of the words were on the page. She was less certain that the words were assembled in any sort of order that would make sense to a more well-rested brain. The more she read it, the more she was certain that there was something fundamentally missing from her paper, and she absolutely could not think of what it could be.

Coffee. That was what she needed. Preferably intravenously, though she was not so tired to think this was a reasonable proposition. She was, however, tired enough to think that the coffee from the graduate kitchenette was a good idea. The rumor was that it was strong enough to strip paint, and about as pleasant to drink, but what it lacked in taste it made up for in being both hot and caffeinated at this time of night. At least now she wouldn’t have to wait her turn; she’d said goodbye to the last of her fellow students a few hours ago. She put down her pen and her most recent printed draft with a sigh, stretched out a cramp in her hand, and went to find coffee, or a close facsimile to it.

The kitchenette was quite spartan: a small alcove indented into the hallway outside the graduate study area containing a sink with a bottle of industrial strength dishwashing liquid to the side, a microwave, and a cheap coffee machine that more often than not burned the ground beans. This was all to be expected. What was not expected was that there was someone else in the kitchenette already; a man half a foot taller than her, dressed more formally than most graduates in dress pants and a button-down long-sleeved shirt. His back was to her as he collected his coffee and Serah’s nose wrinkled at the smell. Black coffee from this machine was taking your life into your own hands.

There was something familiar in the line of his shoulders and the cut of his fair hair, washed out to a light blond under the harsh fluorescent lights. Familiar, but improbably so. Then he turned around, and Serah realised that it was not that the light was washing his hair out; the light was giving his hair colour when it didn’t have any, and turning it from silver to gold. Though he was not dressed in his Academy uniform — and indeed why would he, given that the Academy had never existed in this world — he was undeniably Hope Estheim.

There was a reciprocal light of recognition in his sea-foam green eyes, before his expression shifted to affable confusion as he placed the paper coffee cup down on the narrow bench space between the sink and the kitchenette wall. Serah knew then that he did remember her — and by extension their time in the other world — because ordinarily people went from confusion to recognition and not the other way around. It was only those who remembered their past life in vivid detail that had to pretend that they didn’t recognize people that once they had known intimately. It was this pretending that drove Serah to go to a university away from where she had grown up and see people that she could not have possibly have met before.

How difficult would it have been for Hope, who had known many, _many_ people in his various roles over the years? How lonely an existence that would have been, knowing so many people and having them stare at you blankly, your entire relationship with them visible only to you? It was little wonder he was staring at her in an almost perfect imitation of polite bafflement. Almost, because she knew him well enough to know that the slight tilt of his head meant that he _knew_ her, but that he was waiting for more information before he would commit to a course of action. It would be up to her to make the first move then.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said as she stepped closer to him.  She took his hands and clasped his wrists inside the loose bracelet of her hands, a mirror to how he had clasped hers in his in a paradox-past version of Yaschas Massif once a world ago. She smiled up at him, and hoped that he understood the meaning behind the gesture. _I know you. I remember everything we once were. You can trust me._ “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?

“Serah…?” he said, seemingly lost for words, but he didn’t resist her grip. Then he smiled, incandescent and radiant, and it transformed his face from relatively good-looking to breath-taking. Serah had always liked the way he smiled. It was the smile of a person who believed, genuinely, that he had been shown something wonderful and he wanted the world to know what he thought. She was glad that he hadn’t lost that sincerity when Bhunivelze had stripped him down, cored him out, and refashioned him into a divine puppet. “It’s a pleasure to see you again!”

She let his hands go and tried to keep a straight, solemn face. “Were you really about to pretend that you didn’t know me?” she said, eyebrows raised incredulously. “That’s _terrible_. Didn’t you want to see me again?”

Serah’s impulse was rewarded by Hope raising his hands up in defeat, his expression a perfect representation of dismay.  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he protested. “It’s just — with the reincarnations you can’t be certain what anyone remembers.”

In the face of his utter dismay, Serah couldn’t hold back her giggles. She did feel a little bad about it, though it helped that Hope’s response to her giggling was to smile wryly at being caught out. “I know,” she said as she caught her breath. “I just wanted to pay you back for when you teased _me_ back in Academia.”

“I suppose I did deserve that,” Hope said ruefully. He picked up his coffee and took a sip of it. Serah knew from past experience that the black coffee from that particular coffee machine wasn’t so much drunk as endured while it hit your tastebuds with the finesse and grace of a truck on ice. She was impressed that Hope’s only reaction was to frown slightly and then to gently put the paper cup back onto the bench. He stepped aside to allow Serah space to prepare her own coffee.

“It works better with sugar and milk,” Serah offered as she made her coffee.  “That doesn’t make it _good_ , just masks the taste a bit.”

“I’ll remember that,” Hope said. “I’d heard the rumours about the coffee machine being dreadful, but I thought it had to be exaggeration.”

“Nope!” said Serah.  “It’s all completely true.”  She took a sip of her coffee, doctored enough now that she could swallow it, and thought that she might be able to cope with doing another draft of her paper once she finished her cup.  She looked over at Hope and tilted her head thoughtfully. “I never expected to see you here.”

“The university was kind enough to host me while I research a paper I’m writing,” Hope explained. “After I finished my doctorate, I didn’t want to affiliate with any university right away.”

“Here?” Serah frowned.  “This isn’t exactly the best university for physics. Or engineering. Or computer science. Or archaeology.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Wow, when I list it off like that you sound nearly impossible!”

Hope inclined his head, which Serah knew meant that he didn’t personally agree with the idea, but appreciated that what he was about to say was not going to convince her. “I wasn’t personally qualified in all of those things. I simply had good people who were very talented at what they did, and who were able to explain their findings to me in a way I could understood.”

Serah was not convinced. “Mm-hm. But you haven’t answered why this university. Wouldn’t Eden be better?”

“It is a very good university,” Hope agreed. “And one day my studies may take me there. But for now, I’m a guest of the sociology faculty.”

Serah blinked and thought that maybe her sleep deprivation was hitting her more than she thought, because that made no sense at all. In every time she and Noel had visited, even with the changes that took place in paradox timelines, Hope had always been a scientist, researcher and engineer, somehow marrying what the Academy found in archaeological digs with cutting edge scientific developments. Now that she thought about it, no matter how dizzying traversing the timelines had been, she and Noel had always had Hope backing them up with technology and assistance.“You’re … not a scientist?” she said dubiously.

“Not this time around,” Hope said with a slight smile, suggesting that he knew very well what she had been thinking. “I decided to do something different with my second life.”

“They’re not _really_ second lives,” Serah said thoughtfully. “They’re more …continuations. We’re still the same people, even if we are living slightly different lives. Though…” she said, drawing the word out.  “ _Doctor_ Estheim, is it? That’s different.”

Hope laughed. “Only in the last year. Really, I only use it when I book airline tickets. It’s an instant upgrade, most of the time. I just live in fear of the day that they have a medical emergency and I have to tell them it’s a doctorate instead.”

Serah grinned at the joke. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”  She studied him for a moment, weighing up what she saw. Despite the late hour, he looked happier than he had been when she had seen him in the other timelines. The tension and drive that propelled him forward wasn’t gone, but it seemed focused in a way that wasn’t so hard on him. “Is it what you wanted?” she said seriously.

“Yes.” There was a world of meaning in that simple word.

“I’m glad,” Serah said. “After everything everyone went through, we deserve to be happy.”

“And you?”

“Yes!” Serah beamed. “I know how this world came to exist, which of course I can’t talk about to _anyone_ because they’ll think I’m strange, but it’s everything that happened next that interests me. When we created our present, we had to create a past that matched up with that present, one without fal’Cie or gods. There are civilizations that were born here that never could have existed back on Cocoon or Gran Pulse!”

She noticed that Hope was looking at her intently, a faint half-smile on his face as he nodded in time with her words, and felt her face heat up. She snorted. “Look at me, talking your ear off.”

Hope shook his head.  “No, that’s not it,” he said.  “It’s just … it’s nice to see you’ve found your passion, Serah. You don’t have to apologise for being passionate about something.”

“Passion only gets me so far.” Serah sighed.  Her coffee felt cool enough to drink now, so she sipped at it before adding, “I’ve written a draft of a paper to hand in, and something just doesn’t seem right about it.”

“Would you like me to look at it?” Hope offered, to Serah’s surprise. She looked up at him and he appeared to be completely genuine about his offer.

Ordinarily, Serah wouldn’t share her papers with people outside of her specialty. She’d learned that lesson when she’d asked Lightning to read one of her papers in her first year of university. Lightning had meant well, she was sure, but she just didn’t understand what Serah was writing and said as such before querying the meaning of every sentence. It had ended badly; Lightning had gone outside to try and cool her head, while Serah resolved never to show her assignments to anyone again.

On the other hand, she knew that Hope had been reading papers in all kinds of specialties for decades and so was probably less inclined to protest that she was misusing a word that meant something very different in her field of expertise. At this point, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to take that, not when it was due in a few hours. She thought that she might as well take him up on the offer.

“Sure!” she said, and walked him back to where she had set up her study session.  “Here you are,” she said, handing over the sheaf of papers and a pen.  “Take your time. I can make you another coffee?”

“That’d be great, thanks,” Hope said absently, his attention absorbed by what he was reading. Serah waited a moment to see if he would say anything more, like how he took his coffee, and when nothing was forthcoming, headed back into the kitchenette.

There, she took a breath and held it before releasing it. Seeing Hope Estheim here, of all places, was not how she had expected her new life to go. It wasn’t that she had avoided him, or at least not intentionally. She had had no idea where he had ended up on their rebirth, though an uncomfortably honest part of her appreciated that she hadn’t really gone looking for him either.

She had nursed a crush on him in the old world. She knew that now, with the clarity of hindsight. It wasn’t like how her sister viewed Snow, a maelstrom of emotion that was love and frustration and anger all wound together in a tight spiky ball that Lightning was only now beginning to unwind. It was … respect, she thought. Serah had longed to be recognised as her own hero, rather than being seen as someone who needs to be protected, and in the time that she had known him, Hope had never doubted her abilities. Whenever she saw him in the old world, he had always looked at her as if she was strong and capable, like her sister and Snow. He _admired_ her, with the easy grace of someone who thought that everyone should admire her and couldn’t imagine a world where that wasn’t true.

Snow had protected her and treated her like a princess, and that was something that she had needed at that time. She had been young and lonely, and he made her feel special.  He still did, and she didn’t think that would change. But they had changed, and their relationship had not adjusted to that change. Ending their engagement had been surprisingly painless, in that context. It hurt, of course, but it was a clean pain, and they were still friends afterward. Snow was a perfect ex-boyfriend, patient and friendly and supportive, without any expectation that they would get back together.

She sighed and shook her head at herself. “Now’s not the time for that,” she muttered, and turned the coffee machine on. She stubbornly forced herself to think only about the process of making coffee: waiting for the machine to dispense the coffee itself into a paper cup, mixing in enough milk to turn it from a dull black to something approximating a milk-brown, and stirring in two heaped teaspoons of sugar to make it drinkable.

Hope looked up as she entered the room again. He had taken a seat near the closed door that lead outside the building, near where Serah had set herself up but not too close so as to intrude, and looked to be on the last page. “Oh!” he said in surprise as she set the coffee down next to him. “Thank you.”

“Did you think I’d forgotten?” Serah asked playfully. “Or did _you_ forget?”

“I forgot,” Hope said. He picked up the coffee and sipped it. “This is … better,” he said, and Serah giggled.

“It’s all right. I know it’s bad. But what can we ask for, this late at night?”

“True,” Hope agreed. “At least it’s better than the one I made.” He glanced down at his notes, and wrote something at the very bottom, before handing the sheaf of papers back to her with a sheepish shrug. “You were right about something not being quite right,” he said. “It’s almost there, but you don’t quite make it clear. I’ve added some suggestions about how to make your thesis more apparent to the reader, but if you don’t have time, you’ll still do well.”

Serah looked down at the first page and her heart sank. Hope’s handwriting, the small neat script of a man used to annotating engineering diagrams, was all over her paper. She was sure that he had written more than she had, and this was just the first page. “Oh,” she said and tried not to sound too dismayed.

He rested his hand on her shoulder, a light enough touch that at first she thought she was imagining it. “Have faith,” he said, a curious echo to how he had said it when they spoke in the old world and they were planning to reshape an entire timeline. “You’re more than capable of doing this. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

“Thanks Hope,” she said, and placed her free hand on top of his on her shoulder briefly before letting her hand fall to her side. “This can’t be as hard as saving the timeline, right?”

“Definitely not,” Hope said. “Compared to that, this should be simple.” He nodded at the sheaf of papers Serah clutched in her hand. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Serah nodded absently, her attention absorbed in reading the annotations Hope had left. The sheer among of writing he had left on her assignment was daunting but he was right. She had done more difficult things than simply edit a paper. She had defeated Augusta Tower with her wits while a fal’Cie was right in front of her trying to kill her. She had defeated a weapon that had been part of a great war. And after all that, she stood up and fought a man made immortal by the goddess Etro, even while Her eyes sapped Serah’s life away. Compared to all that, editing her paper would be simple.

As she read through his comments, her coffee cooling on the table, she thought that it might be a simpler proposition than she had first thought. Though there were a lot of comments on the first page — and as she flicked through the pages she saw that the first page was a foreshadowing of how Hope meant to continue editing her paper — the suggestions they were proposing were minor in the scheme of things. Reframing a few paragraphs, removing sentences, rearranging sentences: these were all changes that were well within Serah’s capacity to achieve. More interesting were the comments to the side about potential thesis topics spiralling out from her paper. _Is this for you or for me?_ Serah wondered.  She thought she could see where he was leading, but she wasn’t certain. It was probably for him.

She made a note to locate the papers she had referred to in her paper and put them onto a data drive for Hope to read later.

The last comment was ‘This is a very good paper, and I’m sure you’ll do well with it’. Underneath it, in smaller, messier handwriting, he’d added, ‘I’d love to catch up for real coffee. If you’re interested, let me know when you’re free.’

“You are such a dork,” Serah said fondly, shaking her head after reading it. That must have been the thing he wrote while she was watching. “You could have just _asked_.”

* * *

 

Meeting Hope had jarred something loose inside of Serah and she wasn’t sure that she liked it. Since her rebirth Serah had been, if not content, not dissatisfied with what she had. She was alive, in a world whose future could be shaped by humanity’s hands and not that of the gods, and that was a wondrous and precious thing. Snow was a constant, if itinerant, aspect of her life, and while he rode the roads in search of inner peace, she knew that he would come to her time and again. Lightning had recently returned to her as well, and if she had been frustrated that Lightning had held herself apart for so long, that was only a fleeting thing. Vanille’s smiles reached her eyes now, rather than her smile reflecting light without shining any of its own.

Serah, on the other hand, had slipped into a life that was a hybrid of what she would have had on Cocoon but for its fall, and the life that her sister had had. She wasn’t the school teacher from New Bodhum, nor was she the girl with sword bow who had thrown herself into a time gate to reclaim everything that had been taken away from her.  Instead, she was the girl who had grown up too fast to reclaim a life that wasn’t hers anymore, and had cut off those other parts of herself because she thought that that was how she could be happy. She had made herself less than she was in trying to forget everything that had happened, and that was incompatible with the way that Hope had spoken to her.

Perhaps this was why she hadn’t gone to see Noel yet. She’d heard about him, how his very movements radiated the pride and strength he had now, and how he lit up like the sun when he saw Yeul. He had claimed his idyllic life at her side, but his cocky bravado was tempered by his knowledge of the fragility of life and how easily a person could die. He was cautious, but not overly so. He was no longer afraid of being alone, the last child born at the end of days, because he had all the days and company he could have wished for.

Serah, on the other hand, had truncated part of herself, and that realization made her angry. She had not fought to the end of days to make herself small.

She found Hope’s email address on the faculty website, and sent him an email proposing to catch up in a week’s time.  He’d replied back saying that he couldn’t stay long, but he’d be happy to meet her. She replied that it was a date, and tried to pretend that her toes didn’t curl up at how embarrassed she felt by that. Sadly, her resolve to be the person she had grown to become didn’t include being a person who didn’t embarrass easy when talking to a crush.

That first date had been brief, fitted in between Serah’s classes and Hope’s meeting with other academics: a takeaway coffee in a paper cup, brief, harried smiles over the steam, a meeting counted only in minutes. Serah had given Hope a data drive of papers she’d referred to in the paper he had edited, and told him that her paper was still being marked. He’d smiled, thanked her, and said that he looked forward to reading what she’d found for him. Afterward, she thought that he was only being polite, and felt ridiculous and stupid afterward. Why would he read papers completely outside of his field? He was a busy man, surely he had more important things to do.

She was surprised to find out that he had.   _I did because you thought they were important,_ he’d said in reply when she’d asked, and she wasn’t sure what to make of that, or of the awkward, self-conscious way that he had said it either. _I like your passion, and I want to understand you._ Then he shrugged and added _Also, it was interesting._

It was very sweet of him, but Serah consciously told herself not to think too much on it. It was difficult to do, especially as by their third coffee date Hope was familiar enough with the time period that Serah hoped to specialize in that he was able to talk to her about it as an equal, though he came at it from a very different angle to most of the history professors she knew. She had known that he had an interest in history, but she had not expected it to be a passion of his as well. She supposed that she should have, given how he always seemed happiest when presented with a puzzle, and piecing together their world’s history was one of the greatest puzzles Serah could think of.

By their fourth coffee date, Serah had carved out an hour free between between classes and teaching her first year undergrads. She was pleasantly surprised to learn that Hope would also be free for the hour. They’d been trying to snatch additional minutes for each meeting and had brought it up to fifteen minutes, but a whole hour was unprecedented.

He’s just being kind, Serah told herself sternly as she wielded her mascara wand like a sword. He’s being courteous, she told herself as she smeared lipgloss across her lips, and took in her reflection in the mirror. She had dressed up in a blouse and skirt, complemented with dressy shoes with a slight heel, and knew that for all that she would tell herself that Hope was just being a good friend, she didn’t really believe that. She’d used to dress up to see Snow as well, even before they were dating, and the slightly sweet stickiness of her lipgloss reminded her through her classes of what was could come.

It was to be their fourth time going out for coffee together, and surely that meant something.

Then she firmly squashed that impulse flat. They were friends, and that was a fine and noble thing to have. While she had resolved to go after every opportunity in this world, that didn’t include wasting her time hoping for a relationship that may not be reciprocated. Hope had been solicitous and sweet, but he had always like that with everyone. That was why he had so many people half in love with him in Academia. When speaking to Serah, he had been always a little flustered, and while that had eased off since their first reunion at Yaschas Massif, there was always a degree of nervous tension when they met, as if they both wanted something but didn’t know how to articulate it.

Of course, Serah _knew_ now what it was that she wanted, and simply couldn’t articulate it. Not yet. Not until she was sure that it wouldn’t ruin their friendship, because that was something Serah sorely needed in this new world.

She sighed, fixed the loose parts of her hair using her purse compact, and made her way to the coffee shop just outside the campus.

 _The Seagull’s Cry_ was an inappropriately named coffee shop, both given that the university was nowhere near an ocean, and the name gave no clue that it was for a cafe. Serah, who had grown up knowing the smell of salt-air and the sound of crashing waves against sand, never understood why someone would want to name a cafe after the raucous squawks of seagulls fighting over hot chips, but she appreciated the poetic meta-meaning behind their choosing to meet there. Bodhum had been where everything had started. It seemed apt that a cafe named after the sound of the shoreline was where two survivors and instigators of the Purge would go to catch up.

Hope was sitting outside already. Today, he was wearing sunglasses against the glare of the sun reflected from the pavement, and was again wearing a button down shirt and dress slacks in neutral shades. Serah found the sight of Hope wearing sunglasses incongruous despite wearing a pair herself. It was always something of a surprise for her to remember that as the Academy no longer existed, Hope wouldn’t be wearing their uniform. He always dressed really nicely for these informal coffee dates, which Serah was never quite sure how to interpret. She’d like to think that it was for the same reason she was, but Hope was hard to read in that regard.

“Of course,” he was saying into a phone as Serah came closer. “I’m happy to make time. I’ll check my diary later on today and let you know my availability. No, I’m going to have to go — I’ve got an important meeting I’m about to head to. No, I really can’t reschedule it.” He nodded. “Yes, I’ll be in contact later today.”

“Important meeting?” Serah said, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t know I merited _that_.”

Hope blushed. It was quite spectacular. “Hi Serah,” he managed, and the contrast between the calm, measured voice he’d used on the phone and the awkward stammer was obvious. Was it noteworthy? Serah wasn’t sure. Perhaps he was just nervous because he was interrupted on an important call. “If I didn’t insist on it, we’d never stop being interrupted.”

“Still. _Important meeting_ ,” Serah said, and grinned. “I could get used to that.”

She drew out her chair and sat down opposite Hope.  They had a routine now where whoever showed up first would order drinks for the other. It was meant to result in a fifty-fifty split in drinks, but so far Hope was leading her three to one. Serah had asked him about this at the last coffee catch-up, and he explained that as he didn’t have classes, it was easier for him to get away earlier. Serah wondered just how true that was, given the phone call Hope had just taken. She resolved to pick up the tab next time, even if it meant calling him to come down when she was already there.

Normally they spoke about their studies, and in a way that had been what had driven Serah to dig further into what had happened after her death. Hope’s interest in the humanities was so unexpected that she thought that there had been something more to it. After speaking to her sister earlier that week, she was certain there was more to it than a mere sea change. That worried her, and Serah didn’t want to leave it alone unexplored in case it was something dangerous to him.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said in way of opening. She kept her gaze down on the menu but snuck glances up at him when she thought he wasn’t looking in order to gauge his reaction to what she was about to say. “I think I know why you’re not researching science anymore. And not just because it’s a change.”

“Oh?” Hope said, raising his eyebrows.

“Lightning told me — Bhunivelze couldn’t understand our hearts. He could understand what we think, but he couldn’t understand what we feel, and how what we feel affects everything we do.”

Serah didn’t say what else Lightning had told her during their phone call earlier in the week. Lightning had been taciturn and evasive at first, but finally, Serah had patiently coaxed the events behind Bhunivelze’s defeat out of her. Not everything, of course — Serah didn’t think that Lightning would ever tell anyone everything that happened — but enough for Serah to understand the monstrosity of what Bhunivelze had done. She knew that Bhunivelze had taken Hope’s soul captive to secure Lightning’s compliance, and she knew that it had had some wildly unpredictable results. Bhunivelze did not understand emotions and how they drove humans to defy their fate, even while Hope’s emotions were driving Bhunivelze to the heights of madness.

Did Hope remember everything that happened? She was afraid to ask.

She thought he might, by the way he went very still and quiet.

“Yes,” Hope said finally.  “That’s most of the reason. I was the lens through which Bhunivelze saw everything, and so I know how he created our world, even if I would find it very difficult to explain it to someone else. However, the human heart … that’s something Bhunivelze could never understand.  What I learn, what I theorize and begin to understand, that is _my_ understanding, untainted by the influence of a god.”

It was more fulsome an answer than she was expecting, with the earnest, almost painful, honesty that Hope always used when speaking to her. She had expected Hope to be disquieted by what had happened, and she had expected him to transform that emotional disturbance into something inspirational. It was what he always did. If she was being honest with herself, this was the answer she was expecting. The answer she had wanted was for him to reassure her that while Bhunivelze had lusted after Lightning, that didn’t mean that Hope would try to make himself incapable of love. Of course, had she wanted that answer, she should have asked that question.

“And the rest?”

“I was there when Bhunivelze created the laws of this world,” Hope said.  “Science is about discovery. It’s not a discovery if I’m simply repeating what I had seen, even if I could calculate a formula for divine intervention.”

“True,” Serah conceded with a nod. “Though I do think if anyone could come up with an equation for deus ex machina, it’d be you. Besides, you _were_ good at inspiring people. I just never thought you’d stop doing engineering!”

“Nor did I, at first,” Hope agreed. “But now I’m doing it, I can’t imagine doing anything else. Maybe in a future life, when I don’t remember everything I saw as Bhunivelze’s host, I’ll go back to it.” He tilted his head in query. “How about you? I heard about you and Snow. How are you coping with that?”

Serah blinked at this. It was a question that she hadn’t been asked, or at least not quite in that way. Serah had been the one to end the relationship, and so after the first few weeks of her feeling rather lost and uncertain as to what her identity was now, the subject had never really come up. Lightning had carefully never spoken about her feelings for Snow, despite the fact that Serah had slept inside Lightning’s heart for half a millennia and so knew Lightning’s feelings as well as she did. Perhaps better. Lightning was still not very good at being emotionally honest with herself. She was genuinely happy that Lightning and Snow were making very tentative movements towards a relationship, but it still seemed like they considered their relationship a terrible shameful secret.

The fact that Snow — and it had to be Snow, because for all that Hope and Lightning’s relationship was complex beyond imagination, Serah doubted that they were talking about boys — had told Hope about it was interesting. She wished that she had known the context, and made a mental note to ask Snow later, if it wasn’t too personal. She’d had her fill of asking invasive questions about Hope today.

“No one can keep a secret,” Serah said wryly. She nodded her thanks at the waiter who delivered their coffees. Apparently the barista was practising foam art, as the creamy froth on top of their coffees had a stylized chocobo drawn out of lines of milk.  It almost seemed a shame to drink it.  She sipped anyway, savouring the rich, strong taste of well-roasted coffee. “Yes, our relationship is over,” she said after she set her cup back down. “We’ll always be friends, but…” she trailed off, uncertain of what to say. They’d grown apart? She had died, and become an epitaph to failure rather than a living, flawed person, and he had broken under the weight of the world.

“Five hundred years is a very long time,” Hope said. Serah looked up at him and thought that he might understand. He too had been in Nova Chrysalia, and so knew the weight of years as it pressed down on every part of your relationships until they were hollowed out shells of what once might have been strong, vibrant connections.  He might also be the only person to understand the other position of having grown and changed while the other half of his relationships stayed the same. He might be the only one to understand how sad it could be to have grown into your own hero, while everyone else still saw the helpless child you had been. It wasn’t quite the same of course. Hope had had no choice in growing into an adult away from everyone he had loved, whereas Serah had fought on to the end knowing that it would mean her death. But it was close enough, she supposed.

“Yeah, exactly,” she said. She smiled at him, before looking back at the grain of the table top. “Thanks.”

“I’m sorry.”

Serah’s head snapped up in surprise and she stared at him. “What for?”

“He wasn’t like that at the beginning, when we started the Conseil de Renaissance,” Hope said slowly, green eyes dark and shadowed. “Perhaps if I hadn’t gone up to the Ark…”

Serah cut him off with a wave of her hand. “You can’t take responsibility for _that_ , and I won’t allow you to,” she said firmly. She frowned and added, “You are way too eager to take on responsibility for things that you had no control over, if you even did them at all.”

Hope blinked, expression blank in surprise. He shook his head, minutely, and added ruefully, “That’s probably true, though it’s something I meant to say to you. Perhaps it’s something we have in common, a willingness to assume responsibility for things that were done to us as if we had done them ourselves.”

Serah sucked in a breath. Hope’s words hit a little too close to home. She did still blame herself for exploring the Vestige those years ago, and how it meant that she was chosen to become a l’Cie. She did still blame herself for Etro’s eyes. And she thought she might never stop blaming herself for not listening to Yeul as she and Noel fought their way through Academia on the day that both she and Cocoon fell. Had they listened to Yeul then as she pleaded for them to stop, maybe time would never have stopped. Maybe Noel’s future would have happened, maybe not, but at the moment of her death she had seen the terrible things that would come. Five hundred years of existence after the end of the world, with the only hope of salvation being death. It had been horrible to see, watching people she had helped save become worn to nubs in the passage of time, and knowing that time had come to a stop because of _her_.

“Serah?” Hope was saying and Serah looked up at him. He looked stricken. “I’m sorry, that was … I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, it’s all right,” she said. She gulped her coffee, the hot liquid scalding her tongue. “Perhaps it is something we have in common. It’s funny, I was going to tell you you needed to forgive yourself, but I guess you were going to tell me that.”

“Yes,” Hope said. “That is funny.”

It didn’t sound like he thought it was funny. Then again, Serah didn’t think it was all that funny either, except in a self-deprecating way. “I suppose we’ll just have to forgive each other,” she said brightly. “I forgive you and you forgive me.”

“That’s healthy,” Hope said dryly.

Serah laughed at this. “We’re the reincarnations of the tools of gods,” she pointed out. “It’s healthy for _us_.”

They exchanged half-grimaces.

The silence then stretched on, because what did one say after that?

Serah finally broke the silence with a question that she had wanted to ask for so long.  “Are you seeing anyone?” Almost as soon as she’d asked the question Serah wanted to cover her mouth to stop the words coming out, but it was out now and she couldn’t take it back. She wrung her hands under the table in lieu of trying to pull the words back with her hands, as that wouldn’t help at all and would just make her look more ridiculous than she already felt. Why had she asked such a stupid question?

“No, not at the moment,” Hope said. In fact, he seemed a little intrigued. Serah thought that it might have more to do with how her face was heating up than the actual question itself. “You?”

Serah took a breath and held it, before letting it out in a puff of air. “No, not at the moment.” She smiled ruefully. “You’ve seen my study habits. With my workload, I’d have to date someone at the university!”

That was entirely too forward, and she knew it. She was sure that Hope was looking at her carefully, with that intent gaze he had when posed with a puzzle, because he was wondering just what kind of crazy person he had found himself talking to, and how he could escape without losing a limb. Or worse. Serah remembered, in a flash of hot embarrassment, that Hope had had some pretty intense stalkers over the years, and she hoped that she didn’t remind him of them. Surely, if she did, he would have left by now.

“Hopefully no one in your program,” he said after a moment. He swallowed, a nervous tic Serah knew he had, which did little to help her own nerves. “That can result in unfortunate consequences, especially a tutor or professor.”

“Definitely not.” She laughed, and hoped it sounded natural. She added, trying to pass it off as a joke in case he took it badly, “Though, you’re the only one I know who isn’t!”

He didn’t. He looked intrigued, a little pleased, and something that Serah thought might be reckless resolve. “Really.”  It wasn’t really a question, just a confirmation of something that he had hoped to hear.

Oh. She was such a _idiot_. She had spent so much of her time wrapped up in her own anxiety that she’d missed reading the signs from him, and Serah prided herself in being able to read people. She should have listened to her gut.

“I was just thinking …” she said, at the same time that Hope said “Serah, I was wondering — ”

They both laughed.

“Sorry,” Serah said.  “You go.”

“No, after you, please,” Hope replied, gesturing for her to continue with a wave of his hand.

Serah swallowed, her hands caught up in a white knuckled grip. Even with what she suspected — no, to be fair, she _knew_ — the act of asking was still very fraught with danger. She had existed in uncertainty for so long that it had become comfortable for her.  “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said quickly. She took a breath.  “I was just wondering if … maybe we should meet up out of office hours. Like … like a date.”

As Serah watched, more than a bit of relief blossomed on Hope’s face. “Yes, I’d love to,” he said.

His immediate, positive, agreement released a knot of tension that Serah had been carrying around her chest, and she breathed a laugh at how silly she’d been to be so worked up about it.  “Great!” she said.  “So, uh, what were you going to say?”

“Believe it or not, I was going to ask you the same thing.” Hope said. He added, self-deprecatingly, “Only I meant to do it three weeks ago ago and hadn’t found the courage.”

That, Serah thought, was another thing they had in common. They spent entirely too much time thinking and observing and it took a shove for them to start _doing_. They’d been reborn into a brand new world, free of any divine intervention, and able to chart their own course for the first time. It was really about time they started interacting with it, rather than watching it from the sidelines, and that meant interacting with the people in it.

“In that case,” Serah said, picking up her coffee mug to gesture with it. “Happy fourth date.”

“Fourth — oh, I see.”

“We are time travelers,” Serah said. “If we can’t retroactively change our coffee dates to real dates, who can?”

“I won’t argue it,” agreed Hope.

When Serah had found that fal’Cie so many years ago, she could never have imagined how her life would change, or how her interest in history would ultimately lead to their world falling from the sky, saved from dashing against Gran Pulse by the sacrifice of two girls out of time. When she had stepped into the time gate with Noel, she never could have foreseen that the timeline they sought to create was one where no time passed at all. Both of those Serahs would never have envisaged a happy ending without Snow.

But she was not either of those Serahs. She was the Serah who picked up a bow and defied her fate, who chose to die for her goal, and in the end helped to defeat a god. And that Serah thought that going on a date with Hope was, if not a happy ending, certainly a promising start.


End file.
